Are there studies that connect being poor with laziness or others of that kind?

Tosh5457

Many right-wing people believe most poor people are poor because they're lazy, and most rich people worked for it and deserve being rich. Are there any studies about this?

I searched on google but I only found information like Glenn Beck's opinion on this (lol) and other useless information.

Pengwuino

How do you systematically define "lazy" for one to make a study?

The only thing that I can recall that is remotely of interest to you is a study done a couple years ago showing that, these days, a majority of millionaires/billionaires did not inherit their money. Even then, define "deserve"?

talk2glenn

The problem, as stated, is defining "laziness".

Do we use labor contribution? Then the top 20% does approximately 6 times as much work as the bottom 20%.

Do we use productivity? Then the top 20% are approximately 9 times as productive as the bottom 20%.

None of this, of course, means that population work ethic can be appropriately measured by income quintile. I imagine there are systemic demographic differences between the quintiles which explain most of the disparity in output. Indeed, trying to define and measure "lazyness" as a variable of interest seems like a particularly pointless exercise. You might want to try writing your questions more professionally, by dropping the references to "right wing" and "laziness".

Tosh5457

When I posted my question I was aware laziness can't be measured, but I'm not making a study here, I'm just asking a question. I don't know how to define laziness, deserve, etc, so it can be measured and used in a statistical study. If I did I'd have wrote it instead. I was expecting someone could point me to studies of this kind.

But I guess the word I was looking for was "work ethic", that talk2glenn wrote in his post. So, are there any studies that relate poor/rich people with work ethic?

Pengwuino

If you don't know how to define it, how do you expect other people to be able to define it? Maybe the words are too subjective for anyone to have attempted to make a study of it. Even work ethic is vague. How does one measure work ethic? By how many hours one works? Does being on welfare automatically count as no work ethic? What about work outside of the hours the employer pays you for? Then, of course, just because you have a high income doesn't mean you're rich considering how many people have high incomes who are in massive debt for various reasons.

You'll find it tough to find scientific studies supporting or refuting such vague political nonsense like 'right wingers think X quality about Y group of people'.

Tosh5457

Well I expect people who study these subjects to be able to define it, whether I can define it or not

I had a hunch it wouldn't be easy to find studies of this kind, because it's very difficult to separate correlations and causes in this matter. 'right wingers think X quality about Y group of people' - that really is a political nonsense, but that's not what I asked

Ryan_m_b

I've been trying to find any such papers using the Web of Knowledge database of peer-reviewed literature. I've been using search terms like "Productivity", "Wage", "Performance", "Salary", "Hard-Work" etc all in various combinations. What comes across is that the topic is too vague, there have been many specific studies along the lines of "a comprehensive analysis of wage disparity across ethnicity/sex/age self-employment in industry X" but nothing exactly fitting your bill. Perhaps you will have better luck.

Part of the problem is that nobody adequately defines what they are talking about when they say this. "Working hard" doesn't really mean much, when I was at university I worked throughout the summer at a campsite. I worked damn hard averaging 10 hour days often spiking to 14 hours (often with no breaks, lunch was taken whilst working), sometimes I did this for over two weeks without a day off. My pay was not good for how much I worked. At the time a friend of mine was on a summer work placement with a pharmaceutical company, they worked 40 hour weeks (a lot of which was spent browsing the internet waiting for something to do), frequently enjoyed 2 hour lunch breaks and got paid far more.

This isn't an unusual set up, wage isn't determined by man hours it's determined by how much money the employer can get away with paying which is related to how much money they have (in turn related to how well the company and industry are doing) and how much the employee is looking for (relating to how desperate they are for money and how many other options they have). Consequently the idea that working hard results in more money only works in an ideal system with few variables.

It get's harder when people argue "well X may work less hours than Y but X's work means more". But then that's shifting the goal posts isn't it? If you work 30 hour weeks as a city exec and rake in a million a month you, as an individual, could be working far less than a nurse working 60 hour weeks.

The truth is there is no easy path to wealth, however on average it is probably sensible to say that there are lists of attributes that if one has one will be more likely to get rich e.g. dedication, long-hours, aptitude etc, but there is also a list of circumstances that will facilitate this process that are outside of ones control e.g. luck-of-the-market, health problems, social problems etc.

rationalist76

Well i believe that there are those who had jobs and lost them due to the off shoring of jobs, and i would not consider them lazy. And then there are those who sit around waiting for their welfare check. Me? i believe that the latter one is the less predominate and that many poor people would work if they could

BWV

are you talking about relatively poor people in a rich country like the US, or poor people in a poor country like India?

Poverty, of course, is the natural state of the majority of humankind so perhaps it is more productive to ask why there exists substantial numbers of people who are not poor

russ_watters

While I don't like the characterizations of the OP, I believe useful answers lie in studies of the effects of actual legislation/programs. For example, the failure of Clinton's welfare reform to raise poverty levels as liberals predicted indicates that overall, people dropped from welfare due to the reforms did not require welfare to stay above the poverty line.

Ultimately, I don't find it useful to even consider the propaganda characterizations. It doesn't matter if people who are poor are lazy - what matters is that people kicked off the welfare rolls successfully fended for themselves and didn't drop below the poverty line.

dydxforsn

I've often wondered if there are links between mitochondrial effectiveness (defined to be how well ATP is produced, or perhaps surface area of mitochondrial folds of an individual) and success in society. I've always found "lazy" a vague term too, and I've often felt that every individual has a different level of energy, perhaps because of how well their mitochondria works (perhaps the mitochondria in some of their cells work better than other cells, so maybe an average mitochondrial effectiveness in a particular individual.)

That I think would be a good question.

Edit** maybe I'll ask about this in the biology subforum someday.. (I don't know what is already known about mitochondrial variations or if there's even any at all, I've just thought about it from the couch (lol))

skeptic2

I don't think the difference between poor and rich can be measured by laziness. I see many people who are paid less than me working harder and doing jobs I am too lazy to do. The difference, I think is drive, along with a number of factors, some of which we have no control over.

Evo

Do you actually have any peer reviewed scientific research to back any of this up? Please do not bring up a scientific explanation unless there is actually scientific backing.

dydxforsn

heh, no I don't unfortunately (what I said has no basis as far as I'm aware of but that's what makes it exciting to me). Since I took biology as an elective in college I had always thought about this possible link between laziness in humans and the energy producers of their cells. I sort of thought I remember a professor saying that energy production was proportional to the surface are of the inner-membrane of the mitochondria, but I'm almost certain I'm just imagining it. Though it just seems likely to me. It's certainly not an a priori observation, I was going to study it and ask more questions along these lines if I was still a biology major but I switched to physics fairly early on in college.

Could have been an original Ph.D thesis :D But no..

Evo

Fair enough.

Ryan_m_b

There are many mitochondrial diseases with a wide variety of symptoms, none of which relate to laziness beyond the possibility of chronic fatigue.

EvilKermit

It's really motivation, not laziness, that's important. For example, how much one values a certain item an determine how much work one is willing to put into action.

For example, If I did a study stating that "Laziness is the unwillingness to do certain acts". However, did the person not do the act because he or she had no incentive, or not a strong another incentive. It also would depend what the 'act' is, since some people are more resistant to some acts then others.

In other words, its like porn, you can't accurately define it but you know it when you see it.